Sunday, October 25, 2015

USA/Papers: John Coltrane and the Development of a Radical Black Aesthetic

The
purpose of this article is to consider the ways that Coltrane’s music
might be said to have taken on the character of what Adorno called the
‘autonomous work of art’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Building
upon the 1999 essay by Nick Nesbit entitled ‘Sounding Autonomy: Adorno,
Coltrane, and Jazz,’ this article aims to provide a critical theory of
Coltrane’s aesthetics, examining the ways that dominant socio-political
tendencies became objectified within Coltrane’s music through his
interaction with the historically formed musical material. Unlike
Nesbit, however, this study...